Physics/Astronomy Executive Summary January 2002

Physics/Astronomy Executive Summary January 2002

NOTE: Due to its length constraint, this summary can not contain all of the information, in context, to completely describe our program. For a well-rounded summary of the status of our program, please refer to our Program Planning and Assessment document. Thank you.

1.  Program Description:

Our program exists to conduct courses of excellent quality serving the needs of all the College’s students and programs. Our program exists to provide excellent advising to students, especially to advisees who are studying engineering, architecture, the physical sciences, related areas, and certain technical programs. Our program exists to introduce science and the College to the community through various outreach programs, and to be a strong and vibrant link in the Science Division’s overall program and activities.

Students who complete work within our program will fall somewhere on a continuum that describes the breadth of our program well. This continuum flows from critical thinking skills and application of the scientific method to a highly technical preparation for upper-division engineering and physical science courses. We seek to challenge our students, and to motivate them to be accountable for their own learning, as well as for their actions as informed citizens of an information-based society.

2.  Program Analysis:

We are continuing with the mechanism initiated in 1999 for providing qualitative and quantitative data about student performance, retention, transfer, and progression. We have continued to ask our students to complete brief questionnaires at the start and end of the quarter. These questionnaires are designed to acquire student input about the course they are enrolled in, as well as to keep track of student intent for retention analysis purposes. Our results from the past few years continue to show a high level of student satisfaction with our courses. Students overwhelmingly feel that their problem-solving skills have increased after taking one of our courses. In these surveys students often criticize the college’s lack of laboratory equipment, but at the same time point out that they value the hands-on learning and synthesis of ideas that takes place in the lab.

Our enrollments this fall in the two main physics sequences continue to be strong, and again we have experienced overloaded lectures, laboratories and seminars. Our “service” courses, PHYS 110 and ASTRN 101 are quite popular and tend to fill whenever they are offered. The frequency with which we can offer these courses continues to be restricted by the demands of the two large-enrollment sequences.

The elevation of Professor Emeritus Bob Petersen to the Interim Deanship of the Science Division will have a significant short-term effect on our program. Bob has continued to be an active and valuable member of the department since his retirement, normally teaching about 2/3 load each quarter. Qualified associate physics faculty are currently in short supply in the Seattle area. The full-time faculty will probably have to teach overloads in Winter and Spring 2002, and we may even be forced to cancel sections or courses if we cannot find qualified associate faculty.

Our faculty (associate, tenured and emeritus) are dedicated and effective. Students who complete our courses are well prepared for their further studies, and achieve a record of success. Our advising activities continue to be very effective. Joyce Fagel is an invaluable resource to faculty advisors in our program, supporting us with current and accurate information to pass on to our students. Program faculty continue to be unusually active in Division and College governance and affairs.

We must continue to be aggressive and inventive in finding ways to improve on the still-inadequate state of our laboratory facilities and equipment. Many students have used much more technically advanced and appropriate equipment at their high schools, and are dismayed to see the quality of equipment they must use at the college level. Our students also often mention the fact that Edmonds Community College has up-to-date physics laboratories and do not understand why Shoreline should be different. Their confidence in our program is definitely threatened by what they see and experience in our laboratories. We are concerned that although two of the Strategic Focus Areas (Strategic Direction 2; Strategy 3 and Strategic Direction 6) speak to providing appropriate equipment and technologies for student learning, we have had very little support in those areas for our own program.

In 2000, we lost our dedicated space for the PHYS 100 tutorial. Whereas in recent years it had been a place for physics and engineering students to study and receive tutoring (often referred to as the “Physics Learning Center”), now the space serves as a media storage room. This was a blow to PHYS 100 enrollments, since enrollment in that tutorial no longer gave the students the ability to use the space when it was convenient for them. Our former space was both dedicated and secure, so students could come and go as they pleased. We hope to grow PHYS 100 again when we can acquire a secure and dedicated space for it again. We will keep this in mind as we move toward the remodeling of the 2900 building.

Our attempts at acquiring new laboratory equipment through the budget process have had very limited success. We have, however, instituted new laboratory fees for all program courses beginning Winter 2002. We felt that the collection of lab fees was appropriate for a lab course, and would allow us to better meet the needs of students. Student lab fees are intended to fund in-lab consumables, which we have not had much flexibility to purchase and/or use freely in the past. We chose the initial lab fees to be quite modest and therefore more affordable for students. We will raise lab fees if and when it is appropriate to do so.

Stephanie Diemel met with Berta Lloyd and Joe Renouard last year (along with a few other members of the science division) in order to learn more about sources of grant monies that may help to fund the physics laboratory. However, she was advised that there are no grant monies available for basic equipment for transfer courses. Apparently, the State is expected to fulfill those basic needs. This continues to be a source of disappointment and discontent (and worry, with respect to safety) for us as well as for our students.

3.  Changes/Future Directions:

We will continue to work to improve lab facilities and equipment.

Though the preliminary proposal was produced with absolutely no faculty input (as well as no physics lab), we are optimistic about the planned remodel of the 2900 building, which houses our program’s labs, supply room, work room, main lecture hall, and the Physics Learning Center. We will involve ourselves in the remodeling planning process as much as is humanly possible. We see this an opportunity to greatly improve our physical lab space, as well as to designate a well-thought-out, student-centered space for the Physics Learning Center.